Home network fix, small electrical fixes, Miata uh-oh

(posted from home)
(This post covers 25 – 28 November, 2008)

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Friday, 28 November-

Today is Black Friday and a good-weather day (sunny and 45) so I’m definitely staying out of town.
I worked on the blog and email in the morning and then drove up to the garage to drop off Cherry Larry (it has a hydraulic leak) and pick up the Miata (transmission replacement and exhaust work). Well, this isn’t good. The used transmission swapped in has almost as much noise as the one taken out. Getting this resolved isn’t going to be fun.
That afternoon I walked my four-mile course at home. I saw three perfectly-sunlit bluebirds flying around in our paw-paws. (Now THAT is a great start to a walk!) And on the way home, I saw two great blue herons in an aerial fight along the creek—apparently a territory dispute.

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Thursday, 27 November-

Happy Thanksgiving!
Labashi and I decided to spend Thanksgiving at home this year. Labashi worked on re-upholstering the seats of her dining room chairs much of the day. I spent the morning on the web while the day warmed up a bit (it was 22 overnight but mid-Forties by afternoon).
I rode the Concours in to Starbucks in East York, then up to Rocky Ridge County Park for a walk. Today I walked a new route— I’ll call it the ‘perimeter course’. I stayed as close to the park’s outer perimeter as trails permit. I walked about eight miles, perhaps a bit more, in 2:45.
I had a problem with one section. I took an old overgrown trail I’ve not been on for a few years at the far eastern end of the park. This trail eventually led to private land and No Trespassing signs right across the trail. Rather than retreat back up the steep path, I bushwhacked along the boundary until hitting more in-the-park trail again. I remember seeing No Trespassing signs beside this section of trail so I’d guess the owner had a survey done and found his boundary went further into the park than he had previously thought.
That evening we watched ‘Survivor - Gabon’. It was a mid-season recap but that was good for us; we had missed some episodes.

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Wednesday, 26 November –

Today I worked executor stuff on the phone and tried to organize my new office a bit. With all the paperwork for the estate I need to get my act together. But it seemed I couldn’t get anywhere. Labashi gave me a standing lamp for over the desk but when I plugged it in a large spark shot out of the plug. I found it had exposed wires internally and I had twisted it just right to short-circuit the wires as I plugged it in. I found a new plug in my electrical spares box and installed it. But I think I damaged the upper socket of the receptacle—I can’t plug anything in there. Now I have that to fix.
This afternoon I changed out the motion sensor unit on our outdoor pole light. The old one began working oddly about two weeks ago. After a very foggy night, it didn’t work at all for a few days, then apparently dried out and started working again. But then after another fog, we had another few days of flaky operation. Recently. it would work one night but not the next. The changeover was easy enough but now I’ll have to test it and adjust its sensitivity for a few nights to get it just right. If the sensitivity is too high, it senses passing traffic. If too low, it doesn’t turn on at all or only after passing right in front of it.
I did my four miles late in the day, jogging about a third of it. We spent most of the evening on the web. The DVD store doesn’t have anything interesting lately.

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Tuesday, 25 November –

I spent the day working on executor stuff and fixing our wireless network problem. For the former I spent an inordinately long time setting up online access to a new account because of a software glitch. The security subsystem tried to force me to answer security questions which hadn’t been set up yet so of course I didn’t have the answers. When the customer service rep tried the same logon keystokes, she was presented the correct setup screens. Apparently there’s a bug wherein the correct sequence is over-ridden by a security challenge when it detects the user is coming in from an unrecognized network.
Our home network problem has to do with a flaky MAC filter on the router. Sometimes it works, sometimes it locks us out. Several days ago Labashi was talking away on a Skype session when the call was disconnected and network connectivity lost. Her PC then refused to re-connect to the network until I disabled the MAC filter. Today I switched to WPA encryption and it came up fairly easily. I say ‘fairly’ because Labashi’s PC came up right away on WPA but my laptop refused to connect on the first several tries and it wasn’t looking good. I started writing up a problem description on TechSupportGuy.com and tried the connection again so I could get the messages—and this time it connected. It has been working fine since. Don’t you love PCs?
I had a late start on my walk today but did get my four miles in. I love the evening sky in that last hour of daylight. And for a bonus today, I saw three bluebirds chasing a small hawk along the creek.

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